Word: diebenkorn
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...very old-fashioned," admits Los Angeles' Richard Diebenkorn. "Though I'm interested in most of the new art, painting remains for me a very physical thing, an involvement with a tangible feeling of sensation." In that, Manhattan's Robert Natkin would concur. "The giant cool that is part of today's life-style repulses me," he says. "The artist has to have vulnerability, open up his feelings, and find a loving commitment." Though Diebenkorn and Natkin belong to no school and live and work on opposite sides of the continent, their similar approaches to painting have...
Damp Light. Oblivious to fashion and personal fortune, Diebenkorn has often detoured when a less determined painter might have rested on a comfortable plateau of achievement. Under the influence of Clyfford Still and the late David Park, he plunged headlong into Abstract Expressionism while a student at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Then, in 1955, he found himself in something of a bind, as he describes it, bored with splashing color around with the total freedom that abstraction allows. He felt a sudden need for "a kind of constraint," and found it by painting the human...
...went until two years ago when, just as casually as it had appeared on Diebenkorn's canvases, the figure disappeared. In its place was a bold structural architecture and a damp soft light suffused with the shrimp reds and spring greens characteristic of Ocean Park in Santa Monica, where he now lives. In his latest exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum, his "Ocean Park" series appears to be at first glance totally abstract. But soon the rudiments of a surfside landscape begin to emerge. Diebenkorn admits that a drive past the beach in the morning may affect...
Somewhat surprised that he does not even sketch from life any longer, Diebenkorn is still searching in his painting for that perfect balance of freedom and license. He explains, "Somehow, if you can put a shape, a space, a color anywhere, that's not good. And yet if it has to go just here so specifically because of things like gravity and time of day and source of light, that gets to be a drag...
...painting happened to be ascendant in the U.S. during the postwar years, a small number of good painters continued to paint realistically. In most cases, their canvases reflected the prevailing mode. When abstract expressionism was in its heyday, such figurative painters as the late David Park and Richard Diebenkorn employed the smeary technique and turbulent palette commonly associated with Pollock and De Kooning. In the current era of cool, disengaged pop and hard-edge abstraction, a hardy band of realists has developed a cool, precise, in fact almost surgical style...